We are thrilled to announce that guest editors Pil Hansen and Jessica Watkin won the Canadian Association of Theatre Research Patrick O'Neill Award for Best Edited Collection for their remarkable work on Performance Matters, vol 11, no 1-2 on Dramaturgies of Accessibility, 2025.
Read more about 2026 CATR Patrick O'Neill Award for Best Edited CollectionWe are pleased to announce the publication of the 2025 double issue of Performance Matters on "Dramaturgies of Accessibility," guest edited by Pil Hansen and Jessica Watkin.
https://performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/issue/view/31
Read more about New 2025 Double Issue on "Dramaturgies of Accessibility" PublishedThis special issue invites articles, interviews, and creative works that speak to the question of what it means to be there, in the broadest sense. We invite works that address the urgency of protest, the intimacy of encounter, the uncontainability of affect, the vulnerability of co-presence, the embodiment of knowing, the fullness of silence, the epistemologies of presence/absence, the layeredness of space-time, or any other exploration of the process of being there, of sharing space, together and apart, across multiple technologies of dis/connection. Please submit a 300-word abstract of your contribution, which includes a description of the type of work you will be doing (article, artistic reflection, conversation, podcast, video, etc) and the expected length by November 1, 2025 to Coleman Nye (anye@sfu.ca) and Lilian Mengesha (lilian.mengesha@tufts.edu). Full contributions for accepted abstracts will be due February 15, 2026 and go through peer review to be published in the Winter 2026 issue.
Read more about Call for Abstracts: "On Being There"In lieu of a spring 2025 issue, the new co-editors of Performance Matters are hosting a speaker series until June 2025 looking back at the journal's impact over the last 10 years through selected special issues. The first conversation will be held on January 14th at 9:30 CST/ 10:30 EST with editors Melissa Poll and Jenn Cole.
Read more about Looking Back at 10 years of Performance Matters!This special issue of Performance Matters (11.2), co-edited by Pil Hansen and Jessica Watkin, invites scholarly and artistic research that explores intersections between dramaturgy and accessibility.
Format: Final manuscripts can be prepared as full-length written essays (4-6,000 words and up to 4 images/illustrations), photo-essays (8-12 images/illustrations and up to 2500 words); video-essays (15-30 minutes), podcasts/sound essays (15-30 minutes); or short ‘provocations’ and ‘utopias’ (up to 1000 words or 5 minutes). Please select the format and medium that match your contents, strengths, and technical skills. Co-authoring is welcome. Authors of accepted proposals will receive more detailed information about formatting and providing accessibility in their submission.
Timeline: Interested contributors are asked to send a proposal (300-words) and a short bio (100-words) to issue editors Pil Hansen (pil.hansen@ucalgary.ca) and Jessica Watkin (jessicadwatkin@gmail.com) by April 1, 2024. In addition to outlining the substance of the proposed contribution, please also indicate (1) its anticipated form, (2) the research methods (artistic, scholarly, scientific) and ethical principles (e.g., nothing about us without us) applied, and (3) any other relevant information.
Authors invited to submit full contributions will be notified in May 2024, with manuscript submissions due in November 2024, at which time peer-review and revision will start. We will be working towards publication in the fall of 2025.
Read more about Call for Abstracts: Dramaturgies of AccessibilityCongratulations to Danielle Bainbridge, whose article "Staging Aural Fugitivity Through Nineteenth-Century Freak Show Archives," published in Performance Matters 8.1 (May 2022), has received Honourable Mention for Outstanding Article by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. More information here.
Read more about Congratulations to Danielle Bainbridge!Writing Fellowship for Emerging and Early Career Theatre and Performance Studies Scholars
Posted Spring 2023
APPLICATIONS DUE on August 1, 2023
Mission: To encourage a collegial, productive, and supportive community of academic writing practice and practice of mentorship within the field of Theatre and Performance
Please direct questions and submit applications to Selena Couture, Associate Editor (Outreach), at couture2@ualberta.ca and copy the journal’s email account, tric.rtac@utpress.utoronto.ca
Theatre Research in Canada/ Recherches théâtrales au Canada (TRIC/RTAC) sponsors an annual Writing Fellowship Program to workshop a manuscript for submission to a professional academic journal. Submission to TRIC/RTAC is not required but is warmly encouraged.
The Fellowship seeks to support emerging scholars — such as graduate students, early career faculty, and community-based scholars — working within or across the Turtle Island, Québécois, and Canadian-based interdisciplinary arenas of Theatre and Performance studies.
We particularly encourage applications from equity-owed scholars, especially from communities and/or research areas currently underrepresented in the field. SEE FULL DESCRIPTION FOR APPLICATION DETAILS AND ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS.
Read more about Call for Applications: Theatre Research in Canada/ Recherches théâtrales au Canada (TRIC/RTAC) Writing Fellowship 2023-2024Performance Matters is seeking submissions for its upcoming issue, “Performing (in) Place: Space, Relation, Action.” This issue will focus on artistic expressions that create renewed awareness of the networks of relations that create territory in the context of Indigenous sovereignties and decolonization. We seek artistic articulations, theoretical questionings, and critical engagement with notions of place making: ways in which our creative actions animate shared spaces as well as how place animates us. In this follow-up to Performing (in) Place: Moving on/with land, the editors (Jenn Cole and Melissa Poll) are interested in actions that exist in addition to/beyond spoken acknowledgments of territory and how these actions enable Indigenous people, other than human kin, and Settler collaborators to lift each other up in resurgent and decolonization efforts.
We are asking for scholarly essays (7,000-9,000 words), performance/movement scripts and/or artist manifestos, interviews, practitioner praxis reflections and reviews (1,000-3,000 words). We encourage you to consider contributing within your preferred media (audio, video, visual art etc.). Performance Matters supports multiple formats of sharing work and we are hoping to create an issue for the senses. We are asking for abstracts or expressions of interest from artists/scholars by July 15, 2023. Full submissions will be required by Nov. 15.
Please let us know your availability/interest via jenncole@trentu.ca and melissajpoll@gmail.com. We're open to new ideas and formats so please don't hesitate to be in touch with questions.
Read more about Call for Papers: Performance Matters 10.2: “Performing (in) Place: Space, Relation, Action”This special issue of Performance Matters (9.1) asks: what is the performative force of practice-based research (PBR)? What exactly is produced when universal design principles are explored through music, when intergenerational trauma is examined through dance, or when performance art is used to probe the effects of climate change? Whether it is termed practice-based or practice-led research, practice-as-research, research-creation, or simply artistic research, the underlying proposition of the various methodologies we here call PBR is that creative practices may be used to seek out knowledge while also challenging the epistemological assumptions that produce the concept “research.” Creative practices such as music, dance, theatre, performance and visual art, creative media and writing are situated through PBR as both artistic processes/products and as the ground for (and critique of conventional understandings of) experimentation, analysis, and discovery. Although scholars and artists have worked to define PBR, articulate its pedagogies, design and defend graduate programs, and outline its philosophies, PBR remains poorly understood and unevenly supported in the academy. How does PBR productively articulate with other processual and collaborative methodologies? Who has agency within PBR and what constraints does it operate under? How can PBR methodologies help us to reimagine and reinvigorate scholarly and artistic enquiry?
Read more about Call for Participation: Performance Matters 9.1: Performing Practice-Based ResearchThe editorial team at Performance Matters congratulates Jade Power-Sotomayor, who was recently awarded the American Society for Theatre Research's 2021 Sally Banes Publication Prize for her essay "Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to puertorriqueñxs," published in the most recent Sound Acts, Vol. 1 special issue of Performance Matters 6.2 (2020), edited by Patricia Herrera, Caitlin Marshall, and Marci R. McMahon.
Read more about Congratulations to Performance Matters author Jade Power-Sotomayor!What does a performance studies syllabus instantiate or call into being in the classroom? As an interdiscipline, performance studies has been incorporated as an academic field while still remaining sensationally unsettled in its interventions, methods, and objects of analysis. As such, performance studies syllabi may function as performance scores, performative texts, archives of pedagogical practice, and finally, as the material of our performance as teachers. Indeed, the classroom, for many of us, is our most prolific and durational performance site. These iterative classroom performances rely on scripts as well as improvisational practices, with new forms and constellations emerging from the tried and true. The classroom is then a black box: a space for the staging of collective process, of dialogical exchange, and of inquiry itself as a performance form. It is also a black box in another sense: the classroom walls obscure its inner workings, rendering the performance of pedagogy strikingly difficult to represent. How do we document these performances and make them accessible in some way to those who weren’t there?
Read more about CFP: The Syllabus is the Thing: Materialities of the Performance Studies Classroom
